cloversangel
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- Parts 15
THE LONG GAME
*best friends to lovers | friends with benefits | Briar University*
Eliza Calloway has loved exactly two people her whole life the same way she loves oxygen - without ever having to think about it. Dean Di Laurentis is easy. Dean is home. Beau Maxwell is a whole other problem, one she's been very successfully not solving for the better part of a decade.
Three kids who grew up sharing birthday parties, backyard pools, and one very unfortunate broken arm are now grown, tangled up in Briar University's hockey-and-football gossip machine, and exactly as bad at naming their feelings as they were at seven. Everyone can see it - Dean's over it, Hayley's over it, even the guy running the campus gossip account is probably over it - everyone except the two people actually in it.
When Dean, sick of watching his two best friends orbit each other without ever landing, throws out the worst-best idea he's ever had, Eliza and Beau are about to find out that "no feelings, no complications" was never actually on the table for two people who've been in love since before they knew what the word meant.
Some deals aren't as simple as they sound. Some best friends were never really just friends. And some crowns - plastic, stolen, and worn completely unironically - were always meant to be shared.